Horrid Mysteries

De: Carl Grosse

Narrado por: Deaver Brown

An Historical Gothic Romance set in Paris and elsewhere in France, Germany, and Spain. A rollicking good tale from Parisian salons to Peasant feasts and more.

Public Domain (P)2022 Deaver Brown

Complete nonsense, but read extremely well

Let me explain. When I saw ‘Horrid mysteries’ mentioned among other gothic novels in the ‘Northanger Abbey’, I thought it must be a parody title, Jane Austen making fun of the genre. Then I discovered it was a real novel and had to look it up. I thought a book could not be completely worthless with a title like this. Well… It’s nonsense. I don’t mean it’s silly or dumb or vapid - I literally think there is no meaningful plot or at least I defy anyone to follow it. I was unable to follow who the characters were or how they relate to each other or why they were there at all. It didn’t help that this book seems to be a sequel of another forgotten gothic masterpiece. It’s also a very old translation from German, and I suspect some crucial grains of sense have been lost in the process.

I would just toss it (figuratively, it’s an audiobook) if it wasn’t for the reader. His reading makes it all worth it. How can I best describe it? Imagine you are an early 19th century girl in the US who’s got the gothic bug and reads every gothic novel she can get her hands on. That girl is sick, as many of them were, with consumption, or dysentery, or whatever else was the popular thing back then. Her parents are dead of other Victorian things and she lives with her grandfather. She is too weak to read the book herself, so she asked the old man to read it to her. He can’t make heads or tails if it, but really loves his granddaughter and would do much more for her than read a silly German novel. So in the evening he comes to her room, smelling of whiskey and tobacco, sits down by her bed, fortifies himself with another swig from his whiskey bumper and starts reading. That is what it sounds like. It’s lovely.